Tweet This

If you were to make a list of garments that changed the world, would it contain the basic clothes you wear every day, or one-of-a-kind designer creations that few people can afford?

Kat Mustatea

Touch screen for "Bret.on" by Unmade (Museum of Modern Art, "Items: Is Fashion Modern?" 2017)

By far the most fascinating of the 111 “prototypes” chosen for a new exhibit at MoMA entitled “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” are the humble garments of our day-to-day: Spanx, the white T-Shirt, fleece, the hoodie. Once elevated to the status of museum object, a ubiquitous item like the hoodie (number 050) becomes a complex cultural symbol whose meaning changes according to who wears it and how—from the Unabomber, to technology billionaires, to Trayvon Martin and the racial justice movement he engendered.

The genius of the assemblage, curated by Paola Antonelli and Michelle Millar Fisher, is in its focus on items rather than designers, allowing the pieces to counterpoint each other in canny ways. While Gore-Tex (043) and fleece (040) are now commonplace consumer materials, they were once as technologically exotic as “Zoa” by Modern Meadow, a take on the simple white T-Shirt (106) made of biofabricated leather. This animal-free material is created from a genetically engineered strain of yeast to make collagen—the same collagen as in your skin.

While 3D printing holds the promise that someday anyone might whip up a custom garment in a printer at home, for now it remains an option only for luxury wear: “3D-printing is still slow, making it expensive to produce large items, and the materials can't yet replicate the performance of traditional fabric,” said Jessica Rosencrantz of the design studio Nervous System. Their “Kinematic dress” is one of several versions of the little black dress (060) on exhibit. Made by 3D printing a latticework structure out of nylon that unfolds into the desired shape, as a consumer product such items “are still years away,” she noted.

Clothing is, among other things, aspirational; and the technology that shapes the garments that shape our culture is one way we signal who we want to become.

Mass produced yet unique: "Bret.on" by Unmade (Museum of Modern Art, "Items: Is Fashion Modern?" 2017)

One example on exhibit is “Bret.on” by Unmade, which envisions personalization of clothing at mass scale—a fascinating idea made possible by developments in looming: an interactive touch screen lets you customize the pattern on a traditional Breton (017) sweater, creating infinite variation. The resulting pattern, unique to you, is sent to be machine-knitted. This technique is within reach: “We are planning launches with a multinational US brand within the next 6 months,” said Ben Alun-Jones of Unmade.

Clothing is the great equalizer

The supreme weirdness of stilettos (092) and Spanx (089) comes into greater relief when examined as cultural artifacts. Such items are a reminder that for much of history, the clothing of women was synonymous with torture. Not to dump on Spanx, but the form-smoothing undergarment is an evolution of the girdle, and girdles are associated with a long line of constraining clothing meant to squeeze and prod women’s bodies into whatever shape was considered ideal at any given point in history.

Like tights (101), the advent of Spanx was made possible by new materials and new fabrication technology, but they are also a signal of the different standards to which women and men are still held. As the exhibit catalogue notes about the Unisex Project (105), unisex clothing, whenever it had been available before 1970, “largely involved adapting menswear items (particularly suits) for women,” and this “ultimately reinforced a masculine standard of fashion.”

Intriguingly, Spanx has moved in the opposite direction recently, by producing form-shaping under garments for men. Is this gender progress? In a museum, we can scrutinize the cultural assumptions embedded in our most basic wear, those garments we choose every day, and perhaps better understand who we hope to become.

Kat Mustatea

Video still for "Kinematic Dress" by Nervous System (Museum of Modern Art, "Items: Is Fashion Modern?" 2017)

"Items:Is Fashion Modern?" is on exhibit at Museum of Modern Art through January 28, 2018. (This article was edited to more accurately describe Modern Meadow's biofabrication process.)